


Teeth

by lovetincture



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:29:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23973049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: They’re sitting in front of the rickety fan in the living room, feet propped up on the coffee table. Hannibal would usually find that appalling, but he’s hardly in a state to complain. Will slants a glance over at him. He looks just as miserable as Will feels, stripped down to his underwear and dripping sweat, practically stuck to the couch. Will thinks if he picked Hannibal up, the cushions wouldn’t let him go.Some historical accounts describe the teeth of cannibals as shark-like, but maybe it was only a trick of the light.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 16
Kudos: 164





	Teeth

They’re sitting in front of the rickety fan in the living room, feet propped up on the coffee table. Hannibal would usually find that appalling, but he’s hardly in a state to complain. Will slants a glance over at him. He looks just as miserable as Will feels, stripped down to his underwear and dripping sweat, practically stuck to the couch. Will thinks if he picked Hannibal up, the cushions wouldn’t let him go.

“Regretting the leather furniture now, huh?” His voice comes out muffled around the gauze in his mouth.

Hannibal gives him a pained look.  _ Will, please. _

Will sighs. The oscillating fan keeps getting stuck, and Will reaches out a foot to toe it more in his direction.

He half expects Hannibal to fight him over it, but Hannibal looks too flatly miserable to bother. He’s seen Hannibal take a gunshot wound to the stomach without so much as flinching, but apparently the slow water torture of having each of your teeth fall out is too much even for him to take with good cheer. Will blames the heat. It’s swampy and wet. Suffocating. It seeps into all the cracks between the walls of their minds, throwing the present moment into sharp relief.

And what a shitty moment it is.

He laughs and winces when his teeth cut his mouth.  _ Relief. _ There’s something they could do with.

“Would you get us some more ice?” Hannibal mumbles. His accent is more pronounced around this time of the month, thick and hard to understand.

Will considers saying no just to be cruel, but it sounds exhausting. His mouth hurts too much to play stupid games with Hannibal, so he just nods and heaves himself off the couch.

* * *

This was the thing about cannibal biology—it wasn’t particularly well-studied. Most modern recorded instances of cannibalism were anomalous and not habitual. A spot of cannibalism here, a little friendly man-eating there—it wasn’t enough to make a person change. There were records from some ancient tribes that documented the changes, but anthropologists had long since decided such texts were mythological in nature.

After all, what biological mechanism would make someone  _ change? _

So most of what Will learned about cannibal biology, he’d learned from Hannibal, who knew far more about it than any of the books Will’s tried to consult on the subject. The dubious benefits of firsthand experience.

It didn’t happen until after their years-long dance had finally reached its denoument, when Will had finally given in, to Hannibal’s delight. He ate at Hannibal’s table every day because it was his table too, now, and because accepting one part of Hannibal meant accepting all of him. They didn’t do anything by halves.

At first Will wrote it off as a figment of his overactive imagination. As carelessness—a sickness, maybe. If he felt a little under the weather constantly, bones aching and eyes watering and nose itchy and red, it was probably all in his mind. If he kept cutting himself on the pointed edges of his own canine teeth, he just needed to be a little more careful.

And then his teeth started falling out, and that was hard to ignore.

They’d been feeling  _ loose _ for weeks. Will hadn’t mentioned it to Hannibal at first, but then he had, when he could no longer bite into the meat Hannibal served at his table without a stab of pain ricocheting through him.

He dropped his fork with a clatter that caught Hannibal’s eye—a predator looking for the sound of prey. There was no prey here. Nothing but a piece of perfectly medium-rare steak still impaled on the end of a fork, with Will’s tooth sticking out of it like a polished white headstone.

His chair scraped as he shoved away from the table, in a hurry to get away from it.

_ “What the fuck?” _

* * *

So Hannibal explained, and he gave Will a choice.

“Some choice,” Will said, with a dark twist of his lips. “It’s not as though my teeth will grow back.”

“There are always dental implants,” Hannibal pointed out, eminently reasonable.

Will rolls his eyes. He walks to the fridge, pulls out a raw fillet of meat and bites down. It hurts like hell, and he can’t tell if the warm gush of copper flooding his mouth is his own.

* * *

So his teeth fall out. That is, apparently, part of the process.

“Fucking barbaric,” Will complains.

“Change is often violent,” Hannibal muses.

If Will could compare it to anything, it would probably be losing his teeth in the first grade. The memories are too dimly lit, too far away to be much good to him. He remembers the shock and surprise of it, that first time. Quarters under his pillow from “the tooth fairy” that he knew even then was really his dad.

Except this is nothing like that. There’s nothing wholesome about this. It’s barbaric in every sense of the word, savage and brutal. His permanent teeth make way, dropping like pearls as knife-sharp tooth buds push up in their wake. Anthropological records of cannibal tribes describe shark-like teeth honed to a fine point. Scholars posited that perhaps the pointed appearance was due to manual sharpening. Others wrote it off as a trick of the light.

The thing about sharks, though, is that they don’t have one row of teeth. They have many.

Teeth sprout up like weeds in his mouth, one right after the other. In the beginning, it’s all Will can do not to cut himself on their edges. It seems his mouth is constantly bleeding. He can barely speak or eat without slicing some vital part of his mouth. His tongue feels like raw hamburger, corrugated and bloody.

“This is awful,” Will mutters around a mouth stuffed full of gauze.

Hannibal had taken pity on him and ushered him to the bathroom, unwinding coils of pristine white bandages to cushion Will’s mouth. It’s terribly itchy.

“It will pass.” Hannibal strokes his hair. The white tips of his own teeth glint when he speaks. He beckons Will into his lap.

Will snorts. “Not soon enough,” but he eyes Hannibal’s lap for only a second before laying his head down.

It’s hungry work, growing a new set of teeth. His stomach growls constantly, its empty ache only echoing the pain in his face. The twin pains seem to magnify each other, signals amplified in the sending. The effect is only more pronounced when Hannibal presses down on Will’s belly with the heel of his palm.

He’s not gentle, and Will groans aloud at the pressure.

“Stop.” He bites through his lip in the process (again), pushes Hannibal’s hand away waspishly.

Hannibal is undeterred, unbothered by petty human concerns like  _ consent. _ His hand returns in short order. He pushes up the hem of Will’s shirt and strokes along the curve of Will’s slight stomach, curling his fingers along an iliac crest. He presses down again, harder than before. Will whines at the feeling.

He thinks about protesting, dismisses the idea summarily. He goes still and lets it happen instead.

“Fine,” Will grouses. “You’re going to do what you want anyway.”

Hannibal makes a sound that might be agreement and might be a simple hum of pleasure. He explores Will’s body, less a seduction and more an autopsy. He pokes and prods, pinching here and there. He scratches at the skin stretched across Will’s ribs.

It’s uncomfortable. None of it feels good, but Will finds himself rising to the occasion nevertheless. His cock starts to fill, stiffening slowly against his leg—something about the indelicate care, being treated as though he were a piece of dead meat, a cadaver with no will of its own.

Hannibal’s nostrils flare at the scent of his arousal.

He tilts his head back over the ridge of Hannibal’s knee, watching from below, the observed witnessing the observer. He feels free to do so while Hannibal’s eyes are otherwise occupied, roaming greedily along his body. It’s nice to look without being seen.

Hannibal looks older from this angle, the soft pad of fat below his chin more prominent, the slight bags under his eyes magnified. The effect should be humanizing, but it isn’t.

It makes him look like a prehistoric reptile, something cold-blooded and ancient slithering beneath the waves. Will has to wonder, not for the first time, whether he and Hannibal are still entirely human. His body’s reaction to Hannibal’s untender mercies  _ feels _ inhuman, perverse in a way that still gives him vertigo if he stops to think about it.

Hannibal is good at distracting him from that part, the  _ thinking. _ His hand slides down to cup the weight of Will’s erection, squeezing firmly against the turgid flesh. Will groans again, pleasure and pain twining around each other as he tips his hips up, pressing himself further into Hannibal’s hand.

Hannibal obliges, squeezing him again, rubbing Will firmly through his pants until a wet spot blooms on the surface of the fabric and Will is panting and gnashing his teeth.

At some point he turns his face into Hannibal’s stomach, blocking out the light that’s suddenly much too bright. At some point he bites down, teeth ripping and tearing into lightly furred flesh. Hannibal just cradles him closer, holding his head in place and murmuring encouragement that blurs together. Will comes with a mouth full of blood. It’s a usual state of affairs these days.

Hannibal holds him for a while after, stroking over the line of his back as he comes down. Will can feel blood drying on his face. It’s starting to itch as it congeals. He’s too tired to lick it from his lips—too wary, too.

Hannibal picks up the gauze that had fallen to the couch at some point, wet and stained with sticky red shading toward pink. He uses one of the cleaner ends to wipe Will’s mouth clean before folding it up and tucking it in his pocket.

“I’ll make you something to eat,” Hannibal says, finished playing with Will’s body at last.

He shifts Will gently off his lap. The transition from bony leg to couch cushion is welcome, and Will exhales a small, involuntary sigh of relief. He closes his eyes and lets himself drift, running his tongue gently across the ridges of his new teeth.

He listens to the sound of footsteps receding, the sound of the tap running in the other room.

He wonders what Hannibal will do with the gauze.

* * *

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

If there was a God, you’d think he’d make your teeth fall out  _ once, _ and then it would be over with. Maybe twice if you’re the kind of asshole that gets off on eating your fellow man (or the kind of asshole who shacks up with the kind of asshole who gets off on eating his fellow man). But God has a sense of humor or else he’s a fucking asshole because it turns out Will’s teeth fall out every year like clockwork.

He’s surprised the first time it happens. Surprised and irritated, and his mood isn’t at all improved by how nonplussed Hannibal is by all of it.

Hannibal wanders into the bathroom, hands paused where they were doing up his tie. He stands behind Will and peers into the sink. He sees what Will sees—a shark tooth like the kind they sell on hokey hemp necklaces, perfect and jagged sitting at the bottom of their bathroom sink. There are bits of pink tissue still clinging to it, roots swaying like seaweed against the porcelain.

“Oh,” Hannibal says. He slicks his tongue over his own teeth. “Is it that time of year already? I’d lost track with the excitement last month.”

Will glares at him in the mirror.

_ The excitement _ of course referring to an impromptu killing spree that had them fleeing a certain Antiguan resort on short notice.

_ “Oh,” _ Will repeats, voice dripping murder.

“I’ll cancel our plans,” Hannibal says, and that’s that.

Which is how they would up here, sweating their balls off in the most uncomfortable situation on the face of the earth. Prison’s got nothing on this. The ceiling fan drones on, circulating the air but not nearly enough. The rickety standing fan bangs away in the corner.

Will thumps his head back against the couch, growling softly at the way it jostles his mouth. Air conditioning is apparently aesthetically inappropriate for a Cuban villa.

He’s comforted by the soft sounds that come out of Hannibal’s mouth every so often, pained little moans that escape while his own teeth push up through tender gums. Something keen-eyed and raw in Will lives for Hannibal’s discomfort. He drinks it down like fine wine, gulping it greedy and churlish at the table.

They’ve long since given up on shirts. Shedding is a gruesome process, and they’re both tired of the laundry. Turns out head wounds don’t bleed any less when they’re biologically necessitated, and Will wonders if he bled this much as a child. Tries to remember Mrs. Chilcote’s class in the third grade and can’t, really, beyond the dim recollection that he punched a boy once for peering between the walls of his bathroom stall. He rubs the ridge of his knuckles, remembering.

He gets up and spits another tooth into the bowl they’ve been sharing. Pearly whites stare up at him from the bottom of a cheerful pink enamel bowl, him and Hannibal combined in a sea of slick enamel.

“What’re you going to do with these, anyway?” Will asks, stirring them idly with a finger.

“I thought I might bronze them.”

“Sap.”

Hannibal doesn’t deny it. “I thought you might like it if I saved a few for your lures.”

Will rolls his eyes. “Morbid.”

Hannibal flashes him a gap-toothed grin. He doesn’t look monstrous like this. Doesn’t look anything so much as silly, and it’s ironic, Will thinks, that this thing that has made them both arguably less human has done more to humanize Hannibal to him than anything else in their lives—not the sex, not even tender endearments in the dark before dawn could have given Will this.

So he bitches and moans and shifts against Hannibal on the couch, trying in vain to get comfortable. But he fetches the ice, freezes washcloths for them both to chew on, and can’t help looking fondly at his monster. After all, what is he if not a monster too?

Hannibal favors him with another soft smile, and Will smiles too, with a mouth rare and bloody.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/lovetincture).


End file.
